a. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a recording device capable of automatically producing an image-recorded medium in a desired form.
b. Description of the Prior Art
There have been known various types of recording device, wherein image informations are recorded on an image recording medium in a sheet form. All these recording devices, however, require human operators to attend all the time during the image recording operations so as to given the devices various instructions, or to carry out various pre-treatments and post-treatments.
It is generally desirable that such instructions to be given to the recording devices or such treatments for obtaining the image-recorded medium be performed by the device per se as far as possible so that the considerable amount of time to be spent by the human operators may be reduced. For example, when the sheet recording medium, on which image informations have been recorded, is large in size, the image-recorded medium should preferably be folded for storage. Heretofore, practice has been such that the sheet recording medium discharged from the recording device is folded by the operator, and after completion of the entire reproduction operations, all the image-recorded sheets are compiled in the order of reproduction. In another aspect, in the recording device of a type in which an image original is placed on an image mounting table, and this image original is optically scanned to record the image on the sheet recording medium, it has been necessary that, after predetermined numbers of copy sheets have been obtained from a single image original, the operator removes this image original and replaces it with a new image original placed at a predetermined location, after which instructions for commencement of the recording operations are given to the recording device.
As mentioned in the preceding, if the image-recording operations require many steps to be done by the operator a, considerable amount of processing time becomes necessary, even when the recording speed of the device per se is fast with the consequence that the overall recording speed of the device decreases substantially.